Dive Brief:

• Construction began this week on a 150-megawatt Indiana wind farm that will supply electricity for Amazon Web Services.

• Pattern Energy — which owns a majority share of the Amazon Wind Farm in Benton County, IN, and has a 13-year contract with the online retail giant — spent two years developing the site before breaking ground.

• The project will be built on dormant farmland leased to Pattern Energy by the farmers who own it. A Pattern Energy spokesman told WISH-TV in Indiana that construction and operation of the wind farm will pump $40 million into the local economy over 25 years.

Dive Insight:

The wind farm isn’t Amazon’s first foray into alternative energy.

Earlier this month, the tech leader’s Amazon Web Services announced it would build North Carolina’s first utility-scale wind farm to produce 670,000 megawatt hours of electricity a year for the electrical grid that powers AWS Cloud data centers.

And in June, the firm also revealed it would back the building of the largest solar farm in Virginia to generate more power for its AWS cloud.